by D. James Smith
Publication date: August 15, 2023
Available for $14.95 from your local bookstore or www.amazon.com.
This poetry collection of love and wonder makes clear that what lies in the grave truth of love is an inherent loss. Yes, the poet says, there is pain here, but it is akin to, say, what is felt when a thorn is plucked quickly from the flesh and followed, then, by the warm flush of sudden clarity, a keener knowledge-the astonishment at being fully alive. It is the passing of all things which gives them their preciousness. Yes, this is a fallen world replete with the sting of death, but it is redeemed each time that sensing the cost, we choose to love anyway, embracing its necessity. Whether it is in stopping to notice the widower, the anorexic, the disabled child, or cattle to slaughter, spare buttes and dry fields, landscape specific to the harsh beauty of the interior of California, we too stop as if at stations of the cross, infused with a kind of religious Yes to our allotments of sorrow as they prompt us again and again to go on living fully-loving. This is no work of theology; these poems bypass the mind to warm the heart directly. Remarkable and certain is the achievement of these vital, elegant epiphanies.
Bio
D. James Smith’s work has appeared in Blackbird, The Malahat Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, Stand and many other journals. A Booklist Top Ten First Novel Pick, a nominee for the Pen/ Faulkner and a finalist for The Northern California Book Award, he is the recipient of the Edgar Allen Poe Award as well as a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds MA degrees in Counseling and English and lives in California’s central valley where he studied with Philip Levine.
Reviews
“These poems are masterful in their wonder, a contemplative narrative infused with gentle lyric CAFÉ DISSERTATION surprise. What resonates most here is the heart: of brother, widower, witness. Wise, revelatory, and nourishing, this poet is brave enough to sit with sorrow, skilled enough to lead us out. A true joy through and through.”
– Lee Herrick
“D. James Smith is an extraordinarily compassionate writer. There’s an elegiac tone to Café Dissertation, but Smith reminds us that what is absent can be powerfully present. Such acknowledgment is evermore necessary to us. These honest and tender poems are figures of love, not loss. This book is a gift.”
– Gary Short
“What a gorgeous journey of a book you hold in your hands! D. James Smith’s Café Dissertation lowers us down into the difficult, sweet well of the world’s elegiac heart, where the steady rain of the quiet moments we call our lives pours down, where “the dead are still forever/ sacred in the stations of the imagination.” The San Joaquin Valley is a generational well-spring of poetry in America, and Smith’s verses add to this tradition, poem by poem. There is so much tenderness here, paired with a hard eye for the world we inhabit, filled with moments that will make you “want to go to your knees or throw your head/ back watching a jet fighter vectoring east over the desert/ on a crisp morning, afterburners pulling hard right out of your heart.” This is the real stuff here. This is a book made of tears and love and living. And as painful as it is—goddamn if it isn’t beautiful, too, and loving, from the first word to the last.”
– Brian Turner